How to Turn off Cellular Data for Specific Apps in iOS 7 on Your iDevice

By now, many users know about this but for those that are new to iOS 7 it should come as a pleasant surprise that you can prevent certain apps from accessing cellular data.

For most parts, you don’t want to limit apps in using cellular data. But if you are on a limited data plan and need to tweak things to a T, this feature will definitely be useful. Read on to find out how to do this.

How to Disable Cellular Data on a Per-App Basis on iPhone & iPad

In iOS 7, the options for Cellular data are now located in a separate menu instead of being tucked away inside General.

Open the Settings app

Tap on Cellular. On some iPhones, this is shown as Mobile

Scroll down beneath all the switches and you should see a list of apps with switches. These are all the apps that use cellular data whenever it’s turned on.

Now the simple part: switch off the toggles for the apps that you want to switch off cellular data for.

The apps will still be able to use Wi-Fi to connect to the internet and fetch data/updates and you can’t do a per-app Wi-Fi turn off. But I think that’s a little pointless in the age of unlimited broadband.

When you turn off the switches for the apps, cellular data will be turned off for those apps alone while it will be available for others. This comes in handy when, say, you want to make sure you access mail but you don’t want Facebook or Whatsapp or any other data-consuming app to be fetching data.

Besides the obvious data benefit, turning off cellular for specific apps will also help you conserve battery although it depends on how extensive the data use (by an app) is. For instance, I had hundreds of chats coming in through Whatsapp and it sent my battery spiraling down pretty fast. Turning off Notifications wasn’t helping. Using the cellular option, instead, helped save both data and battery.